Category Archives: Australian Historical Association

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Part of the network diagram of #OzHA2017 conference tweets between 24/6/2017 and 22/7/2017, ie before, during and after the conference. Twitter conversations on the hashtag are shown by lines linking nodes. Click on the picture above to explore the complete diagram (the live diagram may differ to the one above as the Tags Explorer is still collecting tweets)

Twitter is a great medium to use during a conference. Participants can share news from the conference to people who are unable to attend. It is another way of publicising great work by the presenters and showing the world that your professional community is contributing valuable work to society. At its best Twitter conference streams can put you in touch with the latest and greatest research and researchers even though you are not attending the conference. It is not the same as being there, but it is a good second-best.

Twitter can enrich your experience of attending a conference. It is a real buzz being part of a crowd tweeting an event. You are making a small, but positive contribution for the benefit of a community. I am never lonely at conferences because a conference is a chance for me to meet people who I have connected with previously on Twitter and I can meet new friends through the conference Twitter stream. Continue reading →

Conference participants took lots of photos of the beautiful Newcastle sunsets they saw. This photo was taken by Natalie Fong.

Some great online history resources were shared by historians tweeting the recent Australian Historical Association conference (#OzHA2017). I have trawled through a lot of links to bring to you some of the useful and interesting history resources that caught my eye.

Conference Papers

Several presenters have very generously shared their conference papers online:

Blogging the Conference

Tweeting a conference is great, but blogging a conference adds depth that is hard to convey in a series of 140 character tweets. I have not found any blog posts about the conference written during the event, but some have been written after the conference:

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This word cloud shows frequency of words used in the abstracts of papers delivered at concurrent sessions at the 2017 Australian Historical Association conference. Generated using Voyant.

The annual gathering of historians in Australia is big. This year there were nearly 300 papers delivered in concurrent sessions. Yesterday I blogged about the keynotes and plenary panels. Today I will have a look at the masses of papers delivered by over three hundred historians. Before you recoil in horror at the prospect of a very lengthy post, I assure you that I will be giving a very broad overview with a closer look at a few topics. Continue reading →

The main venue of the 2017 Australian Historical Association conference was at the Newcastle City Hall Concert Hall. I liked this evocative tweet by Mike Jones.

If you want to know what history excites historians living in Australia and the latest historical research, you should follow the annual Australian Historical Association conference held each July. This year’s record conference Twitter stream together with the conference program and abstracts gives us a peek into the vibrant conference held recently at the University of Newcastle.

Today I will just focus on the keynotes and the plenary sessions at the conference. Continue reading →

During the five days of this year’s conference at the University of Newcastle sent over four thousand tweets. This online reporting of the conference enables interested people from around the world to follow the latest work of historians living in Australia.

Number of tweets sent using the #OzHA hashtag during the annual Australian Historical Association conferences.^ Includes RTs and duplicate tweets

The History Council of Victoria tweeted: “New mural in Ballarat – ‘The past is history’ – a farewell message for #OzHA2016 perhaps? Thx for a good conference!”

Social media has transformed conferences. No longer are conferences a private experience which might be shared months or years later when some papers are published. Live reporting of conferences on Twitter has gone a long way to enlarging the audience of a conference to interested people around the world. Where conference attendees are particularly engaged on Twitter the conversation on the back channel can add another dimension to the discussion in the conference venue.

Yet, as I noted in my last post about the Twitter stream from the recent conference of the Australian Historical Association, the immediate and abbreviated nature of the tweet severely limits the depth of reporting through that platform. Twitter also uses an abbreviated form of language that can be tricky for the uninitiated to understand. Longer-form reporting in the form of blog posts is indispensable for the comprehensive coverage of the conference.

Good blogging is not easy and it is particularly difficult to do during a conference. Ideally a blogger will attend sessions during the day, then in the evening write an accurate and fair post ready to publish before the start of sessions the next day. It is not easy. I have blogged several conferences and usually finish writing some time after midnight. By the end of a week-long conference a blogger will be quite sleep deprived. Usually I book an extra night in my accommodation and spend the next day reading in bed to recover.

Conference tweeps shared a lot of photos and comments about the bleak Ballarat weather… @AuthorClaireG tweeted about a conference excursion, “Off to the Springdallah goldfields on a very foggy morning!” The weather was drab in Ballarat last week, but this week it snowed.

Last week there was a flurry of Australian history tweeting emanating from Ballarat in Victoria. The 2016 annual conference of the Australian Historical Association was held in the old gold city and over three hundred presenters from universities, galleries, libraries, archives, museums and small businesses talked all things history.

I have attended the last four conferences, but not this year. I was one of those who following the conference twitter stream from afar. At times it was too easy to get drawn into the twitter stream and distracted from what I was supposed to be doing!

This year over two hundred people and organisations sent tweets using the conference hashtag, #OzHA2016. This is great. The more people tweeting the more likely we are to get a good coverage of the conference and a diversity of views. The list of people tweeting using the conference hashtag naturally includes a few people who only tweeted once or twice. I noted last year that the 2015 conference twitter stream was dominated by eleven voices contributing 76% of the tweets. This was in line with the conference twitter stream in 2013. I was delighted to see that this year a lot more people were responsible for this percentage of tweets. Thirty-nine people/organisations contributed 77% of the conference tweets.

It is in this context that we should consider the total number of conference tweets. This year saw fewer tweets than the conference last year. Between the conference start on Monday 4th July and the conference end on Friday there were 1,724 tweets sent compared to 2,625 tweets last year. There was some confusion at the beginning of the conference about the conference hashtag which would have led to some conference tweets not being counted, but I would argue that the fact that the top eleven tweeters were not dominating the tweets anywhere near as much as last year made this year’s conference hashtag a valuable one for people following afar. Continue reading →

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Welcome!

This blog is mostly about Australian history. Yet wherever you live in the world you will probably find some resonances with the history of your region. People have been travelling and communicating across borders since time immemorial. Our histories are intertwined.

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